Monthly Archives: April 2014
The UK economy grew by 0.8% in the first quarter of 2014, compared to 0.7% in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to the latest figures produced by the government. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) commented that the capitalist economy is now 0.6% smaller than its 2008 peak. Chancellor George...
‘Toxic, Corrosive and Hazardous’: The government’s record on health and safety – a TUC report published on Monday – Workers’ Memorial Day – exposes the government’s appalling record on health and safety. The Office for National Statistics (ONS) commented that the capitalist economy is now 0.6% smaller than its...
''WE''RE rock solid and we’re going to fight the closures and sackings all the way,’ RMT rep Sean told News Line at King’s Cross Station in central London yesterday morning, as the 48-hour Tube strike action, which continues until 8.59pm tonight, brought London to a standstill. Sean continued: ‘We’re defending...
ON Saturday 10th May, the News Line and the All Trades Union Alliance – the industrial arm of the Workers Revolutionary Party – will be holding a joint conference in London. (See advert) This conference has been called at a time when the world crisis of the capitalist system is...
THE federal budget bill, authored by US House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan and approved this month in the House of Representatives, privatises Medicare and takes billions from Medicaid, warns the AFSCME federal and local government workers union. It’s so unfair to current and future retirees that even many arch-conservatives...
THE Tory coalition yesterday launched their latest scheme to drive unemployed people off benefits. The scheme, cynically entitled ‘Help to Work’, targets ‘long-term unemployed’ people with a barrage of new rules. The scheme requires that unemployed people have to visit a Job Centre every single day of the week, undertake ‘training’,...
ON Thursday, make or break talks to end the three-month platinum mining strike collapsed once again. The third face-to-face meeting between the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union (AMCU) and the employers, Anglo Platinum, Impala Platinum and Lonmin ended without an agreement. The mineworkers downed tools in January, demanding a R...
THERE are now more than 15,000 Ukrainian military servicemen plus reserve forces and the Right Sector movement, with around 160 tanks, 230 infantry combat vehicles, armoured personnel carriers and helicopter gunships in the vicinity of the town of Slavyansk in Eastern Ukraine. There have already been a number of probing...
SELF DEFENCE forces have confirmed they attacked a Ukrainian military helicopter at an airfield in eastern Ukrainian city of Kramatorsk. A plume of smoke was seen rising over the area. ‘Our people approached the airfield, shot a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) in the direction of the helicopter. There was an...
The results of a consultative ballot of 600,000 local government and school members of the Unison union recorded a massive 70% rejection of the paltry 1% pay rise recommended by the ‘independent’ pay review body last month. According to Unison, this offer would result in 50,000 of the lowest paid...
ISRAEL has called on Palestinian President Mahmud Abbas to rip up the unity deal struck between the PLO and Hamas. Israel earlier suspended peace talks with the Palestinians in response to the two factions agreeing to form a unity government. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu reacted angrily to Wednesday’s agreement,...
Written: 11 May 1916 First Published: Nashe Slovo, 11 May 1916 Source: Trotsky’s Writings on Britain New Park Publications Ltd, London 1974 THE Irish rising has been crushed. Those whom it was thought necessary to shoot first have been shot. The rest wait for their personal fate to be decided after...
WITH the western powers losing their war in Syria, after the British and American workers refused to allow their governments to send troops or launch air strikes on the Libyan model, all of the chickens of British imperialism are now beginning to come home to roost. For at least the...
RUSSIA has begun extensive military exercises on its Ukrainian border following the escalation of violence in eastern Ukraine. ‘The order to use force against civilians has already been given, and if this military machine is not stopped, the amount of casualties will only grow,’ Russian Defence Minister Sergey Shoigu said...
TODAY, 24th April 2014, marks the first anniversary of the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh, when 1,138 people lost their lives and 2,000 more were injured as the unsafe building collapsed. The garment workers were producing clothes for the UK, European and US markets, but clothing brands’ contributions to...
JUST ahead of his arrival in Japan yesterday, US President Barack Obama assured Japan that islands at the centre of its territorial disputes with China are covered by a bilateral defence treaty with the USA. This means that the US is prepared to go to war with China to...
FOOD bank donations have soared 1,000% in response to the ‘utterly vile’ Mail on Sunday attack on food banks, a charity revealed yesterday. The Trussell Trust, a charity which organises the biggest network of food banks in the country said that the Mail on Sunday’s attack had backfired. The Trust...
US Vice-President Joe Biden told the assembled right wingers at the Ukraine parliament yesterday that the US stands with the country’s new leaders in facing ‘humiliating threats’. The parliament has, since February 21 when the just-signed agreement with President Yanukovych was ripped up in favour of a Right Sector fascist-led...
SYRIAN President Bashar al-Assad on Easter Sunday visited the ancient Christian town of Maalula, which his troops recently recaptured from rebels, state television said. ‘On the day of the resurrection of Christ, and from the heart of Maalula, President Assad hopes all Syrians have a happy Easter, and for the...
DOZENS of Palestinian worshipers were wounded and dozens were detained after clashes broke in the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound on Sunday morning with Israeli forces who had stormed the courtyards firing stun grenades and rubber-coated bullets. The raid comes amid frequent clashes in recent days after right-wing Jewish groups urged Jews...
AS hard evidence emerges about how the ‘local welfare assistance’ scheme is operating in practice across England, it is quite clear that deliberately starving the poor and privatising benefits is the official policy of this Tory led coalition. This scheme was introduced in April 2013 to replace the social fund...
The National Union of Teachers (NUT) voted overwhelmingly yesterday in favour of holding a one-day strike in England and Wales in the week beginning 23rd June. The union’s conference in Brighton also decided to consult members on further action as part of the long-running campaign over teachers pay and...
SEVENTEEN GP surgeries in Hackney and Tower Hamlets are facing closure from Tory-led coalition cuts. Five GP practices in Tower Hamlets and 12 in Hackney are understood to be among 98 in deprived areas identified by NHS England as being at risk of closure as a result of changes introduced...
HALF of Cambodia’s garment workers, roughly 600,000, began a nationwide four-day ‘stay at home’ strike yesterday, called by eight trade unions demanding a higher minimum wage and the release of 21 imprisoned workers. Garment workers have already held a general strike seeking an increase in minimum wage from US$80 per...
THE agreement, styled as a ‘de-escalation roadmap’, reached at Geneva last Thursday by representatives from Russia, US, EU and the Ukraine coupist government, represents a massive retreat by the Stalinist bureaucracy and a stab in the back for the Ukrainian working class. The fact that Russian president, Vladimir Putin, was...
THE savage Tory-led coalition’s cuts programme to smash the NHS is now well under way! Figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) show that among 23 European countries, the UK has the second lowest number of hospital beds across the whole of Europe! The figures also show that...
TEACHERS from across the UK will be gathering in Birmingham at the Annual Conference of the NASUWT teachers’ union over the Easter weekend to debate motions for which members from across the UK have voted. The Conference is being held at the International Convention Centre (ICC) in Birmingham from 18-21...
PATIENTS, and trade unions have all strongly rejected South Warwickshire Clinical Commissioning Group’s (CCG) suggestion that NHS patients should pay for their own walking sticks, neck braces and crutches. The CCG suggested to its patient and public participation group last week: ‘Would it be reasonable to ask people to...
KIEV’S military faced off with protesters in east Ukraine on Wednesday to sort out their differences. . . and found none. Soldiers appeared reluctant to go into battle against anti-government activists. When Ukrainian Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs) entered downtown Kramatorsk as part of Kiev’s military operation against anti-government protesters in...
RMT members have voted by huge majorities across the Heathrow Express for strike action in response to a package of multi-million pound cuts which amount to an all-out assault on pay, jobs and safety. The RMT reported a nine-to-one strike vote at the railway privateer yesterday, with an even bigger...
THE food bank charity, the Trussell Trust says it has handed out 913,000 food parcels in the last year, up from 347,000 the year before. The Trust says a third were given to repeat visitors but there was a ‘shocking’ 51% rise in clients to established food banks. 83%...
CHILDHOOD is being eroded as children spend less time with families and friends, according to a survey of members of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), which is holding its annual conference in Manchester this week. In the survey 56% per cent of teachers, lecturers, support staff and school...
On International Workers Memorial Day, 28th April 2014, it is time to call the 2022 World Cup in Qatar by its proper name: a humanitarian crisis, says the International Labour Organisation. At least 1,380 workers from India and Nepal are confirmed to have died since 2010, when Qatar was first...
THE Quarterly Monitoring Report of the King’s Fund does not pull any punches about the future that the Tory-led coalition has planned out for the NHS. It states that the ‘NHS financial crunch is getting closer’ and that ‘Financial confidence within the NHS is ebbing away, with a financial crisis...
THE NHS will face an unprecedented financial crisis in 2015-16,, just after the general election, the King’s Fund charity warned yesterday. In its quarterly monitoring report, the health policy think-tank said that two-thirds of NHS trust finance directors were concerned that their hospital would go into deficit in 2015-16....
THE proposal to blow up five blocks of flats in Glasgow’s Red Road, as part of the opening ceremony for the Commonwealth Games, has been reversed following an outcry from local people and an on-line petition that attracted over 15,000 supporters within days of its announcement. Contrary to the organiser’s...
EGYPTIAN workers are striking to improve their poverty-stricken living standards. Postal workers, textile workers, port workers in Suez and hospital doctors have most recently been taking action. Egypt’s annual urban inflation rose to 9.8 per cent in the twelve months to March 2014 to reach 144.8 points, up from 7.6...
‘My department is running at VERY UNSAFE levels due to inadequate staffing,’ said one of almost 3,000 nurses from across the UK who took part in a major new Unison survey. The survey released yesterday reveal 65% of staff saying that they do not have enough time with patients. The survey...
OVER 3,000 workers and youth staged a rally in the Athens city centre last Friday evening against the visit of the German Chancellor to Athens. The rally was organised by several trades unions, the Coalition of the Radical Left party and other left parties. The Greek Communist Party (KKE) refused to...
TORY leader Cameron is today unveiling measures to force GPs to open from 8.00 to 8.00pm and on Saturdays and Sundays. The hours change is part of a pilot scheme which the coalition government claims will allow patients to book more ‘convenient’ appointments after office hours and at weekends. The £50...
GUNFIRE erupted Sunday morning at a checkpoint, established by workers on the outskirts of the city of Slavyansk in Eastern Ukraine. In the skirmishing, one of the troops from Kiev was killed and five others were injured, coup-appointed Interior Minister Arsen Avakov reported. The whole city is now roused and...
WITH the strike by platinum miners continuing to grip South Africa, senior police officer Lieutenant Colonel Salmon Vermaak outlined internal problems that contributed to the Marikana killings during his testimony at at the Farlam commission. As his cross-examination continued, the North West air wing chief listed inadequate training and...
A LIVELY crowd of 50 Ritzy cinema workers attracted a lot of support in Brixton yesterday, shouting ‘pay the living wage’ and ‘living staff, living wage’ during their strike. In their statement the workers said: ‘The Ritzy is one of the busiest and most successful art house cinemas in the...